[Published in the The New Republic onMarch
20, 2003 (in the issue labeled "March 31") under
the title "Verify First".]

The UN: A User's
Guide

How Bush could have
gotten regime change in Iraq through multilateralism

by Robert Wright

Some Bush administration hawks
have derived a simple moral from America's recent diplomatic fiasco: You
shouldn't use the United Nations to pursue vital strategic goals. But
the facts of the case suggest different lessons: You shouldn't use the
United Nations in such a blatantly dishonest way as to insult the
intelligence of the world; and you shouldn't exhibit so little tactical
imagination that a nation such as France finds it easy to frustrate you;
and you should especially avoid these mistakes when, as in this case,
you could have used the United Nations to reach all of your essential
goals.

U.N. Resolution 1441, passed on November 8, 2002, demanded that Saddam
Hussein surrender any weapons of mass destruction and established an
"enhanced inspection regime." Once Saddam declared that he had
no such weapons, the ball seemed to be in the international community's
court: U.N. inspectors would try to prove he was lying, and, until they
did, war would be put on hold. It was thus a surprise to many observers
when the Bush administration started agitating for war even though
inspectors had been allowed to go wherever they wanted but hadn't yet
found anything.

The Bush administration now claims that these surprised observers
misunderstood from the get-go--that in fact inspectors were never
intended to actually uncover Saddam's hidden weapons. "The
inspectors were never sent there to be detectives," said
Condoleezza Rice. "They were sent there to verify his
disarmament." But, if inspectors weren't meant to be detectives,
then why did 1441 give them detective powers? Why did it explicitly
authorize surprise inspections of presidential palaces? Why did it
empower inspectors to take weapons scientists and their families outside
of Iraq for interrogation?

The fact is that the inspectors' detective function had been built into
1441 by the United States itself. The resolution called for Saddam to
make an "accurate, full, and complete declaration" of weapons
of mass destruction. But the Bush administration knew it wouldn't trust
Saddam's declaration to be complete even if he owned up to having some
weapons of mass destruction. So it insisted on making inspectors so
powerful that they could find out whether he was holding anything back.
Disarmament verification and detective work, far from being the polar
opposites that Rice implies, were one and the same from the beginning.

But, after weeks of inspections that found no smoking gun, the
administration, bent on invading Iraq by early spring, started floating
the "inspectors aren't detectives" line. It was repeated so
often--by Rice, Colin Powell, Ari Fleischer, and a boatload of
Republican talking heads--that it became a kind of background noise, its
grating incoherence no doubt annoying more than one foreign diplomat.

Like it or not, the Bush administration, by going through the United
Nations, had entered the realm of international law. And international
law, like national law, demands proof of wrongdoing as a prerequisite
for punishment. You never hear a district attorney begin an opening
argument by saying, "We all know the defendant is guilty, so let's
give him a few minutes to confess, and then, regardless of whether he
does, let's get on with the punishment." And you're not supposed to
hear the equivalent at the Security Council. But much of President
Bush's rhetoric has sounded more or less like that.

At times Bush seemed to acknowledge that he bore the burden of proof. He
sent Powell before the Security Council with what both men considered
conclusive evidence. And most Americans (including me) found some of it
compelling--most notably wiretaps that seemed to indicate Iraqis were
shuffling around banned items as inspections neared. Still, it wasn't a
slam-dunk case. The rough domestic equivalent--a murder case in which no
weapon or body has been found and in which damning wiretaps could be
cast into doubt by a sufficiently smooth attorney--might not yield a
guilty verdict.

You can argue that the Security Council shouldn't be as hamstrung by
evidentiary doubts as an American jury. And, in any case, such doubts
aren't what led the now-famous French showoff Dominique de Villepin to
block U.N. authorization of war; de Villepin seems allergic to
"ultimatums" no matter how justified they are. Still, legally
speaking, de Villepin's position was at least arguably defensible.
Moreover, he was in a sense offering the United States a great
opportunity. If the Bush team had responded adroitly to the tactical
obstacle he posed, it could have outmaneuvered him and wound up ousting
Saddam with less international grief than will result from the war that
at this writing seems imminent.

After all, any war launched on the basis of Powell's evidence alone has
a major p.r. problem: Trusting the evidence requires trusting the United
States, and that's not a common practice throughout the Muslim world,
where it is most important that a war in Iraq be seen as justified.
Powell compounded this problem by a) sticking doggedly to a dubious
interpretation of the famous "aluminum tubes" that Iraq had
ordered (and never received); b) saying two satellite pictures showed
that Iraqis removed chemical weapons from a site "on the
twenty-second of December as the U.N. inspection team is
arriving"--when in fact the picture showing Iraqi activity at the
site was taken weeks earlier (and was ambiguous anyway, according to
U.N. analysts); and c) touting a British intelligence report that turned
out to have been largely plagiarized (not to be confused with documents
that the Anglo-American team had earlier offered as proof of an Iraqi
nuclear program, documents that turned out to have been forged).

In light of these screwups, and the preexisting mistrust of the United
States, Powell's evidence simply didn't qualify as a smoking gun in the
court of world (as opposed to American) opinion. The Security Council's
refusal to authorize a war at that point was a useful reminder of this
fact--and of the corollary that evidence unearthed by U.N. inspectors in
the presence of TV cameras would be a much better premise for war.

Inspections almost certainly could have produced such a smoking gun if
Bush had given them months more to work and had strengthened them. He
could have massively expanded the inspection team and proposed a
hard-nosed Security Council resolution defining specific acts of
noncooperation as automatic triggers for war. (For example, the Iraqi
government would have to deliver all weapons scientists for multi-day
interrogations--and refusal by any of them to answer any germane
question might even itself be defined as noncooperation.) Failure to
meet specific disclosure benchmarks-- documenting the supposed
destruction of anthrax by such-and-such a date--could also have been
defined as automatic triggers for war. The Bush administration often
claimed vaguely that Iraq was withholding the full cooperation demanded
by Resolution 1441, but Bush never broke this assertion down into
clear-cut tests, as some Security Council members advocated.

This new resolution, unlike 1441, would have defined the thresholds for
war precisely and left no doubt that further Security Council
authorization of war was unnecessary. Obviously, the French wouldn't
have loved this idea. But Bush, by offering to hold off on war in
exchange for this "automaticity," could have put them in an
awkward position: By vetoing the resolution, France would be starting a
war. And that would have been bad for de Villepin's image, not to
mention Jacques Chirac's. (Note how flexible Chirac started sounding
this week, on the eve of war, suddenly suggesting that a mere one-month
delay might be enough to satisfy him.) Besides, putting war off would
have been a big concession on Bush's part, allowing France to validly
claim a major diplomatic victory.

In any event, even if France had vetoed the resolution, the
administration could have embarked on war in better geopolitical shape
than it finds itself in now. Bush would have been seen as earnestly
trying to make inspections work, rather than constantly trying to
short-circuit them.

So why didn't the administration try such a resolution? Lots of reasons,
but the biggest one may have been fear of success. From the beginning,
Bush wanted not just disarmament but regime change, and he worried that
the former would preclude the latter; if inspectors actually found
weapons, the world would insist on giving them time to find more
weapons, ad infinitum. (Indeed, Bush seems to have signed onto
Resolution 1441 on the assumption that Saddam wouldn't let inspectors
into Iraq.)

My own view is that once inspectors found a smoking gun, the case for
war would have become stronger, not weaker. You can't expect inspections
to uncover every last canister of nerve gas and every vial of anthrax,
so, once we had proved Saddam to be hiding something, we could have
justifiably demanded that he abdicate and that Iraq accept U.N.
governance for the duration of a good housecleaning. Saddam might have
refused, causing a war, but then at least we'd be fighting someone who
had been proved guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt.

What's more, in making inspections succeed, we would have shown that the
United Nations can work as an instrument of coercive multilateralism.
That would have been a crucial accomplishment, assuming that the United
States doesn't plan to invade every country it suspects of making
biological or nuclear weapons.

Resolution 1441, like many products of intensive negotiation, is an
ambiguous document. It allowed France to plausibly claim that Iraq
shouldn't be invaded because it hadn't been proved beyond doubt to
possess the weapons of mass destruction that were the crux of the whole
matter--even though France, like the United States, presumably believes
that the weapons are there somewhere. The resolution also allowed the
United States to plausibly claim that Iraq, by failing to cooperate
fully and immediately, was subject to invasion--even though Iraq
cooperated with inspectors in essential respects and much more fully
than Bush had expected.

Still, it was the United States, more than France, that departed from
what had initially been the consensus interpretation of Resolution 1441:
If Saddam agreed to play the game--made his declaration and then let
inspectors try to prove him a liar--punishment would await the
inspectors' discovery of a smoking gun. And the reason the United States
abandoned the spirit of 1441 was that its claim to be seeking mere
disarmament and not war or even regime change (a claim that was
"operative," as Richard Nixon's spokesman used to say, during
much of the winter) was never really true.

In any event, the main question now isn't whether the United States or
France was on stronger legal ground or which nation was guilty of
greater perfidy. The question is whether the United Nations offers an
institutional framework through which the United States can pursue valid
goals--such as disarming and sometimes even deposing regimes that have
weapons of mass destruction in violation of international law--more
effectively than it can pursue them outside the United Nations. The
answer is that, in this case, it almost certainly could have.

Even in the eyes of its champions, the United Nations isn't some
transcendent power that can always be counted on to work effectively and
justly. It is an organization of nations. As with any political body,
its members try to use it for their self-interest, and, if enough
powerful members can find a zone of overlapping self-interest, the body
can work pretty well, pretty often. But, if the leader of the strongest
member nation doesn't truly want the organization to work, then it
probably won't.

The tragedy is that a sufficiently creative president could have made
the organization serve America's interests and at the same time could
have prepared the ground for repeating the exercise in the future.
Instead, confronted with France's ambition of geo-poetic dominance, Bush
displayed the crude single-mindedness and petty nationalism that has led
the United States to its current status as least-popular polity in the
known universe. John F. Kennedy used to say, "Don't get mad--get
even." But, when France had the audacity to complicate America's
plans, the Bush administration just got mad.